> > Honestly, I'd rather have a stone which was formed over geologic ages in the bowels of the Earth than one which was formed over the last month in a garage i

> > Honestly, I'd rather have a stone which was formed over geologic ages in the bowels of the Earth than one which was formed over the last month in a garage in Hoboken. > Can you elaborate on why you feel this way? I guess I can try, but I suspect that it's one of those things where different folks just have different mindsets. I think that it'd be amazing to have a stone (diamond, emerald, sapphire, amethyst — whatever) which was the result of long and slow processes operating over millions of years (in the case of diamonds, dating back to the Precambrian, before there were even plants). That's just incredibly cool! Sure, a lab-grown diamond is an interesting exemplar of man's technical artifice, but it's just not the same thing. It's an emotional difference, not a rational one.